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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a